Sunday, December 18, 2011

Popeye Reasons To Be Animated

Obviously, Popeye cartoons use many ingredients to make them so special. Throbbing is one of them.Personality is another, but those are secondary qualities of cartoons. Well, actually maybe throbbing is pretty important since it is hard to imagine live action being able to throb to the beat.

But the one creative quality that is unique to animated cartoons is demonstrated artfully in this here clip.

1) Visual Metaphor - the hand with the vice grip. It's a good gag, and appropriate to the character and story, but kind of obvious since it is half literary.

2) The Eye gag - this one is more creative because it just comes out of nowhere. When I show the clip at festivals, the hand gag gets smiles, but the eye gag gets huge laughs. it's less expected.

I wonder if this is one of Dave Fleischer's gags. I talked to Shamus Culhane and Myron Waldman and they both sort of complained about how Dave would come around and make them add gags that were really out there. Good for Dave, I say!

Popeye via Fleischer remains one of the most unique animated characters around: One of my favorite "old-timer" cartoon series.

Btw, JK, what ever happened to the Hungarian animator who worked on Mighty Mouse The New Adventures? His stuff in that show really stood out with energy and imagination.

Another CGI Popeye's apparently in the works. I wonder if those animators will be up to trying some of the more outlandish Fleischer visual gags, or (better) come up with something really unique on their own.

Istvan Majoros is the most prolific aniamtor on The Simpsons. He's the guy who draws Homer with a perfectly sculpted cranium.He did some pretty far-out stuff around 1993.http://babysimpson.co.uk/gallery/frames/4/9f09/182.jpg

Saw a Fleischer (I believe) version of a xmas cartoon with Rudolph etc. on TV yesterday. It was very sly and seemed full of odd undercurrents, a satanic looking Rudolph, a somewhat lecherous Santa... If that was Dave Fleischer at work, it flowed a lot like the Superman cartoons in style and tone. Not much of a story tho.

If I ever saw the cartoon that clip was from I don't recall it. However, my reaction to the eye gag wasn't a grand laff, but a drawn out mental "F----------------k!" (I know you don't like profanity here.)

And I love that kind of stuff. Always have, even when I was a really little kid when I was first watching all of those Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons.

@kurtwil, johnK - I dunno if he's still on the Simpsons, but he was definitely a layout guy on "The Springfield Files". The DVD commentary credits him with the hysterical scene detailing Mr. Burns' "Friday night tune-up". Now there's a sequence of basically nothing BUT only-in-a-cartoon ideas - even where the script is concerned. You wouldn't even SUGGEST such ideas in a conventional modern writers' room. Well, maybe if it was "30 Rock", but they'll do anything...

Speaking of slavic animators, WHY is it that NO ONE can tell me anything specific about Basil Davidovic?! I think his background is Croatian, like Berke Breathed, Hammerson and myself, so naturally I'm REALLY curious about the guy. I mean, for cripes sake, he worked on "A GRUESOME TWOSOME"!!! Any help here? Anyone....?

@Zartok-35 - That's a pretty conservative drawing, isn't it? It's fun, but it's not really wacky. Is that from "Homer's Triple Bypass"? The last part of that scene has a completely insane layout, I think by David Silverman, who also directed the episode. It's a perfect example of how he would put completely nuts, totally impossible camera moves into a scene. Kind of like the Fleischers, actually...

Anyway, do you know if Istvan did any layouts on the Fourth and fifth halloween installments? Those, as it happens, are also episodes where Silverman -and Jim Reardon- figure heavily....